Egalitarian Intellectualism

If anti-intellectualism has become, as I believe it has, a broadly diffused quality in our civilization, it has become so because it has often been linked to good, or at least defensible, causes…It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves.

The age of Obama is already bringing a turn toward equality. Maybe not fast enough or big enough, Paul Krugman says. Maybe it lacks the courage to declare its convictions, Leon Wieseltier says. I’m with them both. I want more—more money, more government, more principles, more fight. The Republicans in Washington wake up every morning to prove that there’s no hypocrisy to which they won’t sink. Political defeat might have prompted them to reassess. Instead, it’s freed them to be their worst selves. They are openly rooting for the President’s, and therefore the country’s, failure. They want to bury the Democrats, and therefore the Americans, in the rubble of a disaster that was largely of their own making. So much for a new era of responsibility.

What does all this have to do with Richard Hofstadter?

The American “passion for equality” takes different forms in different ages. For modern liberals, it means the enlargement of government’s role in economic life when the private sector creates manifestly unfair and socially destructive inequalities. That’s where we are now. For modern conservatives, it’s a language of resentment and contempt toward the intellectual and bureaucratic élites who want to enlarge government. David Brooks, who is always worth reading except when he channels Spiro Agnew every thirteenth column, used this language a couple of weeks ago in sneering at the “Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants” of Washington’s Ward 3, who “disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are.” Limbaugh, Hannity, and the House Republicans fleck their mouths with its foam every day.

Obama’s task is to reject their anti-intellectualism, which is related to political populism of the right-wing variety, without falling into the trap of sounding and acting like the self-righteous liberal weakling they imagine or want him to be. (After his first press conference, conservative pundits mocked him for being “professorial,” when Obama had simply done what his predecessor never did: explain himself to the American people.) He has to remind Americans what egalitarianism should be: not a Palin campaign rally, but the birthright of every American and the glue that holds the national community together. Equality is not the opposite of intellect; it depends on intellect for its true realization.

To do this, Obama will have to be willing to make enemies, just as F.D.R. was. Or rather, to acknowledge the enemies he already has.